Gil Ribak is a tenured Associate Professor at the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Arizona. Born and raised in Israel, Prof. Ribak came to the U.S. on a Fulbright Fellowship and completed his Ph.D. degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He held several academic positions, such as the director of the Institute on Israeli – American Jewish Relations at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles and the Lewin Postdoctoral Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. His book, Gentile New York: The Images of Non-Jews among Jewish Immigrants, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2012. his second book, Crude Creatures: The Representation of Black People in Popular Yiddish Culture – A New History, is under contract with NYU Press (scheduled to be published in 2025).
Prof. Ribak has published numerous articles in journals such as AJS Review, American Jewish History, East European Jewish Affairs, Israel Studies Forum, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of American Ethnic History, Modern Judaism, and Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies, among others, as well as in many books. Among other fellowships, he was awarded the European Union’s Marie S. Curie Senior Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies at Freiburg University, Germany; a research fellowship by the Gerda Henkel Foundation; and a fellowship by Fordham University & the New York Public Library. His current research is about the construction and portrayal of blackness in Eastern European Yiddish culture.